Philippa Gregory: The Virgin's Lover

“You should only marry a very, very old man, then,” he amended.

A delighted giggle escaped her. “Why ever?”

“So that he would die at once. Because you look so enchanting in black velvet. You should really never wear anything else.”

It was the rounding off of the jest, it was the turning of a pretty compliment. It was what Robert Dudley did best in the world, along with horse-riding, politics, and merciless ambition.

Elizabeth was wrapped from her pink nose to her leather boots in mourning black, blowing on the tips of her leather-gloved fingers for warmth, a black velvet hat at a rakish angle on her mass of red-gold hair. A train of chilled petitioners trailed away behind the two. Only William Cecil, her longtime advisor, was sure enough of his welcome to interrupt the intimate talk between the two childhood friends.

“Ah, Spirit,” she said fondly to the older man who came toward them, dressed in clerkly black. “What news d’you have for me?”

“Good news, Your Grace,” he said to the queen, with a nod to Robert Dudley. “I have heard from Sir Francis Knollys. I knew you would want to be told at once. He and his wife and family have left Germany and should be with us by the New Year.”

“She won’t be here in time for my coronation?” Elizabeth asked. She was missing her cousin Catherine, in self-imposed exile for her fierce Protestant faith.

“I am sorry,” Cecil said. “They cannot possibly get here in time. And we cannot possibly wait.”

“But she has agreed to be my lady-in-waiting? And her daughter— what’s her name?—Laetitia, a maid of honor?”

“She will be delighted,” Cecil said. “Sir Francis wrote me a note to accept, and Lady Knollys’s letter to you is following. Sir Francis told me that she had so many things that she wanted to say, that she could not finish her letter before my messenger had to leave.”

Elizabeth’s radiant smile warmed her face. “We’ll have so much to talk about when I see her!”

“We will have to clear the court so that you two can chatter,” Dudley said. “I remember Catherine when we had ‘Be Silent” tournaments. D’you remember? She always lost.”

“And she always blinked first when we had a staring joust.”

“Except for that time when Ambrose put his mouse in her sewing bag. Then she screamed the house down.”

“I miss her,” Elizabeth said simply. “She is almost all the family I have.”

Neither of the men reminded her of her flint-hearted Howard relations who had all but disowned her when she was disgraced, and now were swarming around her emerging court claiming her as their own once more.

“You have me,” Robert said gently. “And my sister could not love you more if she were your own.”

“But Catherine will scold me for my crucifix and the candles in the Royal Chapel,” Elizabeth said sulkily, returning to the uppermost difficulty.

“How you choose to worship in the Royal Chapel is not her choice,” Cecil reminded her. “It is yours.”

“No, but she chose to leave England rather than live under the Pope, and now that she and all the other Protestants are coming home, they will be expecting a reformed country.”

“As do we all, I am sure.”

Robert Dudley threw a quizzical look at him as if to suggest that not everyone shared Cecil’s clarity of vision. Blandly, the older man ignored him. Cecil had been a faithful Protestant since the earliest days and had suffered years of neglect from the Catholic court because of his loyalty to his faith and his service of the Protestant princess. Before that, he had served the great Protestant lords, the Dudleys themselves, and advised Robert’s father on the advance of the Reformation. Robert and Cecil were old allies, if never friends.

“There is nothing Papist about a crucifix on the altar,” Elizabeth specified. “They cannot object to that.”

Cecil smiled indulgently. Elizabeth loved jewels and gold in church, the priests in their vestments, embroidered altar cloths, bright colors on the walls, candles and all the panoply of the Catholic faith. But he was confident that he could keep her in the reformed church that was her first and earliest practice.

“I will not tolerate the raising of the Host and worshipping it as if it were God Himself,” she said firmly. “That is Popish idolatry indeed. I won’t have it, Cecil. I won’t have it done before me and I won’t have it held up to confuse and mislead my people. It is a sin, I know it. It is a graven idol, it is bearing false witness; I cannot tolerate it.”

He nodded. Half the country would agree with her. Unfortunately the other half would as passionately disagree. To them the communion wafer was the living God and should be worshipped as a true presence; to do anything less was a foul heresy that only last week would have been punishable by death by burning.

“So, who have you found to preach at Queen Mary’s funeral?” she asked suddenly.

“The Bishop of Winchester, John White,” he said. “He wanted to do it, he loved her dearly, and he is well regarded.” He hesitated. “Any one of them would have done it. The whole church was devoted to her.”

“They had to be,” Robert rejoined. “They were appointed by her for their Catholic sympathies; she gave them a license to persecute. They won’t welcome a Protestant princess. But they’ll have to learn.”

Cecil only bowed, diplomatically saying nothing, but painfully aware that the church was determined to hold its faith against any reforms proposed by the Protestant princess, and half the country would support it. The battle of the Supreme Church against the young queen was one that he hoped to avoid.

“Let Winchester do the funeral sermon then,” she said. “But make sure he is reminded that he must be temperate. I want nothing said to stir people up. Let’s keep the peace before we reform it, Cecil.”

“He’s a convinced Roman Catholic,” Robert reminded her. “His views are known well enough, whether he speaks them out loud or not.”

She rounded on him. “Then if you know so much, get me someone else!”

Dudley shrugged and was silent.

“That’s the very heart of it,” Cecil said gently to her. “There is no one else. They’re all convinced Roman Catholics. They’re all ordained Roman Catholic bishops, they’ve been burning Protestants for heresy for the last five years. Half of them would find your beliefs heretical. They can’t change overnight.”

She kept her temper with difficulty but Dudley knew she was fighting the desire to stamp her foot and stride away.

“No one wants anyone to change anything overnight,” she said finally. “All I want is for them to do the job to which God has called them, as the old queen did hers by her lights, and as I will do mine.”

“I will warn the bishop to be discreet,” Cecil said pessimistically. “But I cannot order him what to say from his own pulpit.”

“Then you had better learn to do so,” she said ungraciously. “I won’t have my own church making trouble for me.”

“‘I praised the dead more than the living,’” the Bishop of Winchester started, his voice booming out with unambiguous defiance. “That is my text for today, for this tragic day, the funeral day of our great Queen Mary. ‘I praised the dead more than the living.’ Now, what are we to learn from this: God’s own word? Surely, a living dog is better than a dead lion? Or is the lion, even in death, still more noble, still a higher being than the most spritely, the most engaging young mongrel puppy?”

Leaning forward in his closed pew, mercifully concealed from the rest of the astounded congregation, William Cecil groaned softly, dropped his head into his hands, and listened with his eyes closed as the Bishop of Winchester preached himself into house arrest.